The Negotiating Committee is providing this update to the AMFA Membership at Southwest Airlines. This report is the only official authorized source of negotiating communications by the Committee.

We met with the Company in Dallas, Texas in the afternoon of Monday, November 28, for a scheduled one and a half day mediated negotiation session. Since the Company has remained unresponsive to our proposed resolutions to their “must have” items, we chose to use the afternoon to work on some non-economic items that we previously proposed. The first of these items was a Vacation Bank. Although the Company had previously agreed to a “40 hour Roll-Over” program, its concept of allowing only 40 hours maximum from a previous year to be rolled-over and used in the following year fell short of our original proposal. We have previously met with the Company’s technical representative in negotiations and she explained that our Vacation Bank proposal would be easily administered and that they would just create another “bucket” mirroring sick time, current year vacation, floating holidays, etc. to keep track of an employee’s banked vacation. Although our proposal does not force the Company to accommodate the extra vacation by creating more slots, we see this as a benefit to the membership by allowing extra vacation that could be used as the schedule allows, plus the banked vacation could be used as a financial buffer to help a member get through hard times. The second item that we revisited Monday was the concept of adding, “Leads” to the current language in Article 10, Section 4 regarding the filling of temporary vacancies of more than 30 days. This proposal again does not create any economic impact to the Company, but allows for a potential quality of life benefit to the members in the classification.

On Tuesday, as scheduled, the Company presented a comprehensive package for the Maintenance Controller Team Lead and Maintenance Controller classifications. The proposal was to establish an appendix of differences, which would reside in the back of the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA). The Company explained that existing White Book language would apply to the Maintenance Control group, except specific differing language would be set forth separately in the proposed appendix. After spending the morning discussing this concept with the Company, we caucused as a Committee and worked with the Maintenance Controller Subject Matter Experts (SME) to thoroughly comprehend the proposal and create a list of clarifying questions.

We met back with the Company in the afternoon and worked the rest of the session to receive clarification regarding its Maintenance Controller proposal. Please keep in mind that the proposal from the Company was a package of all the work rules throughout the entire CBA, in addition to specific different work rules that it felt applied only to the Maintenance Controller workgroup. We would like to thank the SMEs Rob Cush, Jason Leyda, and Tim Ananiadis for their time and contributions to the process. Our next scheduled mediated negotiation session is December 6, 7, and the morning of 8. Please contact your representative to answer any questions you may have related to these negotiations. As we cautioned previously – please continue to watch what the Company does as opposed to what it says.